“In fairness to Klein, he’s actually 29.”
But still though, Young Ezra Klein has packed in quite a bit in those 29 years, championing a president who is an equal wiz at foreign and domestic policy, and helping to trash the reputation — and possibly resale price — of the Washington Post and its veteran staff along the way.
Which is why, now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
— 23-year old Ezra Klein, January 3, 2008.
In a Friday morning missive, Washington Post pundits Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas tore into the website as “confusing” and ideal “ammunition” for those who argue the law will create yet another cumbersome bureaucratic program.
Klein and Soltas introduce the piece with a comparison to Apple’s program glitches—a comparison the Obama administration themselves made. The authors don’t buy the comparison, however, suggesting that, had the website been a private sector product, “the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.” Among the problems, they continue, are the “confusing” nature of the website’s instructions on everything from choosing a user name to extra security questions and the clumsy coding, torn apart by web designers on Reddit.
What’s more, the site has been so unsuccessful in signing people up for the program that the one man in America capable of navigating it, OFA volunteer Chad Henderson, has become something of a microcelebrity. [At least until he blew himself up shortly after this article was written — Ed] Klein and Soltas note the absurdity of this—and, particularly, the fact that the Department of Health and Human Services put him on a conference call, so eager were they to speak to someone who could successfully use their website.
— “Ezra Klein: Obamacare Website ‘Confusing,’ ‘Really Bad,'” Frances Martel, Big Journalism, October 6, 2013.
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